Moderator: Shelley Liebembuk
Location: Zoom Room A
Online Session
Exploring human-elephant conflict through playwriting in Kenya
Set against the backdrop of apparent human disconnect from nature as a cause for degradation of the planet, this article focuses on the human-elephant conflict in areas of rural Kenya, and the ways in which playwriting explores and performs that relationship. Working within traditional conflict resolution practices of dialogue, the article questions ways in which to decentre humans, foregrounding equitable justice in bringing the elephant into the conversation too, through theatre.
The Trial of Athena is a one act piece of interactive theatre, currently touring communities in Kenya, with the audience as jury, where a matriarch elephant is put on trial for killing a four-year-old human child at the foot of Taita Hills, Kenya. As the play unfolds the multifaceted and complex relationship that has created human/elephant conflict is explored, with the audience being asked to give the final verdict.
The matriarch elephant is represented on stage by a large puppet, operated by two people, completely created out of natural and recycled materials. Through her presence, the writing process explores ways in which playwriting can deepen our understanding of the human/elephant relationship, centering her as a non-verbal (in human language) character and her ability to connect, evoke empathy and communicate with the audience, bringing us into her world, creating a new relationship with humans through theatre.
Her physical presence challenges western notions of anthropomorphism, examining her role in the play through a Kenyan lens of spiritual and mythological beliefs of human connection with elephant life forms, rooted in the ancient oral literature of the cultures.
Lizzie Jago, Youth Theatre Kenya
I am a playwright, the Artistic Director and co-founder of Youth Theatre Kenya, with an understanding of conflict, and a passion for peace, encompassing peace resolution work in the Great Lakes region post the Rwandan war of 1994, to community theatre, both with the Elephant Queen Outreach and the Population Conversation in Kenya.
Katrina: Animal Individuality and Performing Agency
So often in art, animals—and horses especially—are included as metaphors. Their bodies are used to represent freedom or beauty in an anthropocentric sense. They are rarely included as unique individuals, empowered with their own agency, interests, and objectives. This metaphorical framing overrides their personalities and perspectives, encouraging humans to see each animal as fixed and interchangeable with the next. But as Una Chaudhuri writes, “animals are not figments of our imaginations. They have … real lives as rich and valuable as our own” (38). How can we push back against this interspecies injustice, and learn to honour animals in their own light? Is it possible to destabilize the anthropocentric gaze within a creative act? Or does the act of framing an animal in performance, inherently override the individuality of that animal?
In 2023, I was invited to create a video installation for Supercrawl, an outdoor arts festival. In this piece, I explored how performance could be used to highlight the agency and individuality of a single animal actor, Katrina (my horse companion). However, the delivery and execution of this work proved to be more complex. The creation of this work was highly improvisational, inviting Katrina to collaborate and influence the creation. The exporting of this work involved audio and video manipulation to highlight Katrina’s experience, drawing an audience into a new intimate relationality with an individual horse. However, when the final installation was released into the wild of an urban, human-centric space, Katrina was admired, objectified, and/or ignored. Was she acknowledged as an individual? Or did the deep history of metaphorizing her body override the nuance of her being?
Works Cited
Chaudhuri, Una. “Animal Acts for Changing Times.” American Theatre, October, 2004, pp. 36-155.
Kimber Sider, University of Waterloo
Kimber Sider is a multimodal storyteller working predominantly in performance and documentary film. Sider is the Artistic Director of the Guelph Film Festival, holds a PhD in theatre from the University of Guelph, and is a Lecturer in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo.
Dancing through Diasporic Grief
In 2003 performance scholar Diana Taylor wrote that the body could remember and teach history just as a written Archive could, and that this compendium of corporeal memory (the Repertoire) could include music, songs, dance, gestures that are not simply ephemeral but in fact historical. More recently Layla Zami argues, in Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing Through Spacetime, Historical Trauma, and Diaspora in the 21st Century (2020), that “perforMemory” demonstrates how integral dance performance is to political remembering of traumata[sic]” (57), and how “PerforMemory foregrounds corporeality as a mode of production and transmission of cultural memory […] a remedy to the epidemic silencing that erodes the memorialization of political trauma” (29), so that through dance both archive and repertoire are accessed to “generate memory transmission” (58), to create new pathways for remembering and surviving.
Sarah Waisvisz, Queen’s University
With Afro-Caribbean, French, Dutch, and Jewish heritage, Sarah lives at the intersection. She is a playwright, dramaturge, and multi-disciplinary performer. Her solo script Monstrous, about the Afro-Caribbean-diaspora experience and mixed-race identity, was published in alt.theatre 13.3 and performed at b current’s rock.paper.sistahz festival in Toronto and across Canada and the US. Her 2-act play Heartlines (about queer-Jewish activists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore), premiered to sold-out audiences at Ottawa’s 2020 undercurrents festival and had a sold-out mainstage run at Great Canadian Theatre (GCTC) in 2022; Heartlines will be published in December 2023 by Methuen Drama (Bloomsbury UK). Sarah has been Artist-in-Residence at GCTC and at the National Arts Centre. She is currently working on Double Helix, an Afro-futurist, magical-realist play about the African diaspora, and she directed Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s Witness Shift for Obsidian Theatre and CBC Arts as part of the filmed anthology 21 Black Futures. Sarah is Assistant Professor at the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University.